July 03, 2007

Old Persian News

There has been an interesting development in the study of Old Persian. Old Persian
is the language of the royal inscriptions of the Achaemenid kings, such as the
Behistun inscription of Darius,
and is known to us almost exclusively from these inscriptions.
The inscriptions are written in a unique
writing system, cuneiform in form, but in structure quite different from the more
familiar Sumerian-Akkadian Cuneiform and its derivatives, such as Hittite, Elamite,
and Hurrian Cuneiform.

This writing system is generally believed to have been created for Darius and to have
been deliberately restricted in use to royal inscriptions. This was not because there was
no other application for writing - Achaemenid Persia was a literate society that kept
extensive administrative records. However, it kept them in Elamite and Aramaic, not Persian.

The development, reported in a recent paper by Matthew Stolper and Jean Tavernier,
is the discovery
of an Old Persian administrative text. A nice photograph may be seen here.
The tablet was actually excavated in 1934, but
no one seems to have noticed until recently that it is in Old Persian. Much of the text
is uninterpretable, but enough can be read that it is clear that it is an administrative
text: it deals with a transaction of unknown type involving 6,000 or more litres of a dry
commodity from a named person in five named villages.

The implications of this discovery are not clear. It may be that Old Persian cuneiform was
used for purposes other than royal display and that only one example has thus far been found,
or it may be that this example is a fluke. Stolper and Tavernier have an interesting discussion
of literacy in the Achaemenid Empire and how it could be that an administrator could get
away with writing such a document in a language and writing system not normally used
for such purposes.

Incidentally, over at the Harvard Iranian Studies Department Prods Oktor Skjærvø
has made available on-line
his Old Persian Primer.
Those worried about learning to read Old Persian cuneiform will be heartened by Stolper and
Tavernier's view that "For a modern student, to learn the Old Persian script is
a work of scarcely an hour".
Skjærvø
also offers Older Avestan, Younger Avestan, and Sogdian, introductions to Zoroastrianism
and Manicheism, the two major pre-Islamic Iranian religions, and Wheeler M. Thackston's
reference grammars of Sorani and Kurmanji Kurdish. An excellent opportunity to bone up
on your Iranian languages.